Art cannot be, in any case, as it has been claimed, a faithful copy of reality... It is an emphasis of reality in all that it has more typical, more eternal, more true; it's choosing and highlighting what is more general, more permanent.
The truth of art is eternal, of history ephemeral.
To idealize life, isn't it the only acceptable form of realism?... To romanticize life, isn't it the only acceptable form of classicism?
A drama, a novel, a lyric piece, a work of eloquence must make us know the state of mind of those who produced them and put on an external form as perfect as possible...
Feeling and form, here are the two essential, indispensable elements of any art, of any literary production, and when a work knows how to bring them together, the rest is of little interest to us, the author is free to support and fight all the truths he likes .
It is not enough for the artist to make us know his way of feeling, through his external creation; his work must also be felt, tasted by the public, it must awaken in the soul of others the emotions of the artist himself... Art is a soul correspondence between the artist and the public.
What an artist expresses through colors, through sounds, through stone, through words, are less his personal emotions than the emotions of the entire audience. He must therefore guard against everything that is exclusively individual in his soul, why he does not find any kind of representative in the souls of others...
Art is made for the public and must be understood by the public. Any good work of art is intimate and somewhat pedagogical at the same time. It represents, merged in itself... external reality, the feeling of the artist and the feeling of all mankind.
No art is more stubbornly national than poetry.
Poetry is not the free rein given to emotion, but a way of escaping from its dominion, it is not the expression of personality, but a way of escaping from its dominion... But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to free yourself from them.
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be concerned with philosophy or any other subject. We can only say, because it seems likely, that the poets of our civilization, as it now stands, are forced to be difficult poets...
The maturity of a literature reflects the maturity of the society that produces it.
The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more and more allusive and indirect, in order to compel the language, even by doing violence to it, to express his thought.
The theory of "art for art's sake" (if it can be called a theory), is still valid insofar as it can be taken as an exhortation to the artist to remain an artist; it was not and never will be valid for the viewer, reader or auditor.
True poetry must express the real world, but also our inner world and this transformed world that we have dreamed; that truth that is within us if our eyes are truly opened. If the real world has not absorbed the poet's head, he will never be able to return to the world anything but abstraction and confusion, formless dreams and absurd beliefs. His personal poetic reality will not stand before the poetic reality of the world.
Poetry cannot change the world. The world changes through deeds. But poetry can change consciences, and they are the ones who direct the facts.
I don't pity poets who have run out of readers, I pity readers who have run out of poets.
I don't think humanity will be able to find anything to replace poetry. Poetry will exist forever. And each age will find its own language that will make it viable, so that it can effectively fulfill its ethics - in the deepest sense of the notion - to be a true mission.
The poet... generalizes, a collective experience, and this is precisely why he is worthy of consideration... What interests me, in a poet, is the fact that he is able to generalize a collective experience by projecting it.
Undoubtedly there are individual talents, but they must be rooted, in the soil, in the way of being of their people, to produce something permanent.
No strong and healthy literature, capable of determining the spirit of a people, can exist unless it is itself determined in turn by the spirit of that people founded, that is, on the broad basis of the national genius.
The arts... are pieces of the subjective life of the people - and if that art, national, characteristic, on the one hand strengthens the national consciousness and on the other it broadens its horizon, because it makes it include even more characteristic and national element, how had included until then.
Man is the highest and noblest work of art of nature: in an even nobler sense he should also be the most beautiful work of art of art, of his own creative, free, conscious, moral power.
Through art, for good.
The artistic sense is, in essence, nothing but the living feeling of life. Who lives outside of himself, or rather, he in whom external things live a concentrated and burning life.
Art is unity. It is proper to art an effort to bring into a certain kind of harmonious and charming unity the diversity and apparent disorder which reigns in nature.
Reading imposes the habit of examination of conscience and, at the same time, gives it to us... Literature proper is the painting of our soul, our morals, with a little scholarly exaggeration, intended to highlight the most important and interesting parts of reality.
Great writers are contemporaries of the future.
The artist does not have the strength to collect the stones of the house he is building for us at the risk of crushing his chest and injuring his hands, on a different path than the one we follow with him... His purpose is to to spread his being, to give as much of his life as possible to all lives, to ask all lives to give him as much of them as possible, to achieve with them out of an obscure and magnificent collaboration, a harmony so more moving the more other lives participate in it.
The writer... is not only a writer, but also a "militant", a man who creates life together with other people, a man who builds not his own world, closed in himself, but a world of all humanity.